Godwin Siundu

European football worlds and youth identifications in Kenya

This article examines the various ways in which the phenomenon of English football, beamed across the world via satellite television, provides a canvas upon which many Kenyan youth can confront their lived experiences and desired aspirations. Drawing on theoretical tools fashioned by discourses on identities – pan-Africanist and global – together with dynamics of youth and popular cultural productions, I demonstrate how football as a leisure activity allows the youths a chance to imagine themselves as being more than what they are in material and socio-economic terms. This, I hold, is part of their larger aspirations of assuming global and cosmopolitan identities.

Vassanji’s disquiet with history in A Place Within

ABSTRACT Moyez Vassanji’s A Place Within: Rediscovering India (Anchor, 2009) came quite late in Vassanji’s career, when his standing in minority literatures was already secure. Yet, it marked his reconnection with India, a place that overshadows most of his creative writing. As he encounters his deeply layered personal and communal history, he realizes it has withheld some information in some instances, and misled him in others, calling for his scrutiny of the place (India) and discipline (history) from which he draws inspiration for earlier writings. All these dynamics are concentrated on East Africa, where he received his initial idea of India, and which acts as the testing ground for ideas and the realities of India that he encounters. In this article, I examine Vassanji’s struggles with the histories and geographies of India as captured in A Place Within, and examine his presumptions and generalizations. I propose that his discoveries of the place and people of the India that he narrates are based on a tenuous grasp of the historical dynamics whose consequences are the current challenges that defy his comprehension. The slippery grasp possibly emanates from a nostalgia handed down to the narrator from his forebears.

A Provisional Analysis of Diaspora Engagement Policies in Kenya

Bethuel Kinyanjui Kinuthia, Fred Jonyo, and Godwin Siundu undertake an analysis of the diaspora engagement policies in Kenya through contextualizing the debate in the economics and Africanist discourses. By providing Kenya’s diasporic profile and historicizing the state–diaspora relations in Kenya, the chapter problematizes questions on the country’s diaspora engagement policies by deploying Gamlen’s diaspora engagement policies typology. Ultimately, the chapter offers a critique of Kenya’s diaspora policy and how it impacts the engagements of the country’s diaspora groups.